Experimental investigation of angular error during taper cutting of titanium (ASTM Grade 2) using WEDM process

Abstract

Today, mechanical industries are looking for processes that can produce high-precision products with fewer tools to get maximum accuracy. To achieve this, WEDM is so far more widely used, which had shown remarkable technological growth in the last decade. After the success of straight cutting, the wire EDM tapering process have taken it to the next level of taper generating surfaces by being able to machine complicated parts with inclined profiles. After the rigorous research in this field, it is found that wire breakage & wire deformation plays a very significant role while working with taper cutting in contrast to straight cutting which results in creating undesirable effects on the required taper angle. One of the ways to deal with such problems is to control the process parameters. After performing an in-depth literature review, it is found that for pure titanium the consequences of different process parameters on a variety of key performance measures are not sufficiently analyzed in wire EDM taper cutting. This research work makes every possible effort to investigate experimentally the machining performance by conducting the taper cutting of pure titanium while using the WEDM technology. The role of process parameters like taper angle, wire tension, wire feed on response parameters like angular error was studied. Experiments have been carried out on pure titanium by implementing Taguchi’s L9 orthogonal array which involves three variables with three levels. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been performed to analyze the effect of process parameters and the contribution of each parameter affecting the responses have been calculated. It can be concluded that taper angle is the major primary crucial control parameter that influences the angular error followed by wire tension. For minimizing the angular error, recommended parametric combination is taper angle at 4 degrees, wire feed at 7 m/min (117 mm/s), and wire tension at 7 units equals 1020 g (10 N) for taper cutting of Titanium (ASTM grade 2) using wire electrical discharge machining process.